SanFilippo: No need to write Flyers' obituary yet

Hockey people say it all the time -- winning the Stanley Cup is the hardest thing to do in professional sports.

They usually cite the fact that upon completion of a grueling 82-game season that takes more than six months to unfurl, teams then have to find the energy and dedication to plow ahead for another two months, often playing through pain to live up to the macho, bearded manliness of what it means to be a hockey player: to drink champagne, beer, Captain Morgan -- you name it, out of an oversized, silver chalice.

It sounds hokey when described that way, but until you live it, until you experience a championship run, even without actually winning, but coming darn close as the Flyers did a season ago, you won't understand just how cool the process is and how difficult it is to attain such success in the sport.

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Sometimes it takes a glance at the past to really appreciate the opportunity to play for, let alone actually win the Stanley Cup. And sometimes, it's hard to see in that rearview mirror when you are trained so forcefully to focus on what's ahead that you careen through hockey life with blinders on.

So it's no wonder so many diehard Flyers fans are worried about the prospects of their team that was rolling along so smoothly until a few weeks ago.

It's also no wonder that players like Chris Pronger, who wants just one more Cup win to put a stamp on his surefire Hall of Fame career, also sense some impending doom as they overanalyze their own games and get lost in a world of too much thinking and not enough instinct.

When a guy like Pronger, one of the great locker room leaders in the sport, decides to unleash his furious anger on a teammate or two for their sloppy play in turning over the puck, it's perfectly acceptable to know that he's right. He's been to the Promised Land. He knows what it takes to achieve the ultimate hockey goal, and if this is part of what makes that happen, then so be it.

But it's also perfectly acceptable to understand that he, too, is stuck in a world of self-doubt and disconnected comprehension about how a team can go from being one of the best in the sport to playing like a disinterested also-ran in the span of a few weeks.

When you're a part of the spiral, it's not as easy to see your way out of it as it is from the outside.

It's like the kid who panics in the Hall of Mirrors on the Boardwalk and keeps smacking his head into one pane of glass after another until he makes it out of the maze, while onlookers on the outside giggle at his malaise.

The conspiracy theorists, though, want to suggest there is a split in the locker room. That there is a disconnect from what the coaching staff is preaching. That there is some explanation for losing four straight games, six of eight, and then being a couple of unlucky bounces away from dropping another game to the worst team in hockey.

That kind of thinking folks, is beyond the pale.

Because what the Flyers are currently experiencing -- shoddy play in their own zone, chronic power play miscues, inept offense, a loss of mental focus on the system they should be playing as they go in and out of hockey consciousness over a 60-minute span -- is no different than other championship teams have had in the past.

Here is the sample set:

n Last season's champion Chicago Blackhawks dropped eight of 11 games in March.

n In 2009, the champion Pittsburgh Penguins went 2-8 during a 10-game stretch -- and that was with Sidney Crosby and Evgeni Malkin healthy.

n The Detroit Red Wings, the winners of the 2008 Stanley Cup, lost 10-of-11 in February.

n If it's a larger sample that's needed to prove this point, consider the 2007 Stanley Cup champion Anaheim Ducks, who featured Pronger and fellow Flyer defenseman Sean O'Donnell on the defensive corps. That team, in a two-month span, lost 17-of-25 games played.

n During Flyers coach Peter Laviolette's days as the bench boss of the 2006 Stanley Cup champion Carolina Hurricanes, that squad lost six-of-seven at the end of the regular season and the beginning of the playoffs, and still were able to balance the scales in time to go all the way.

Is it fair to say that during those aforementioned stretches, there was a lot of self-loathing going on? The answer is yes.

It's proven. Every season, the team that wins that big prize, the team that goes through the roughest rigors of a hockey postseason, has one of these bouts with the hiccups that they can't seem to shake.

But instead of downing teaspoons of sugar, or holding their collective breath, or scaring themselves silly or any other homemade remedy to try and make the hiccups stop, they need to relax, refocus and get back to breathing normally.

After all, much like this season's Flyers, that's what got them to the top of the standings in the first place.